Laura Anne Gilman's Blog, page 61
July 19, 2014
Are you in the Doghouse yet?
cgbookcat1
and
alfreda89
, send me your mailing address!Originally posted by
suricattus
at Are you in the Doghouse yet?Author copies! (Plus a curious Kitten)
When Ginny Mallard and her sometimes-partner Teddy Tonica are asked to look into the situation of an old man about to be evicted, the part-time investigators think it’s just a matter of sorting out misunderstandings. But this is no simple landlord-tenant spat, bringing them headfirst – and nose-deep in trouble – into the world of back-room fights and animal rights…
And this time, Ginny’s shar-pei, Georgie, and the bar cat Penny are the only ones who can get the truth out of their sole witness: a puppy named Parsifal!
DOGHOUSE will be in stores July 22nd. But I am running out of shelf space, so I need to find good homes for some of these. Want one? Two randomly-chosen commenters will win!
The Culling of the Beloveds
(the rule for fiction is: if I haven't read it in a year and have lost interest, it goes. It I read it and felt no desire to read more of the author's work, it goes. If I read it and loved it but haven't touched in it several years/won't reread it any time soon... it probably needs to find a new home.)
If anyone's interest 'shopping' in the culled list when I'm done, drop me a line.
EtA: up to 42 books, one of which was a duplication and two were galleys. Also determined that the first printing hardcovers of Elizabeth Lynn's "Dancers" trilogy and my much-battered, much-read copies of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit go nowhere.
Also, this will leave my possession when someone pries it out of my cold, dead fingers (or offers me a boatload of money for it):
In very good condition, with color plates. There's no copyright page, but the inscription on the flyleaf reads 1933.
July 18, 2014
You Know You're a New Yorker When...
And before anyone gets all ick! in my post:
Rats are cute little bastards.
yeah, in too large a number they become massive and potentially dangerous pests, but I'd say that about people, too.... and rats generally don't bite for no reason. Not are they "filthy" when given proper living conditions.
(this was not one of the massive sewer rats of lore and legend...those are the gang members of the rodent population. But, again, humans have those to...)
SIGNAL BOOST: Waterstones, Gender Equality. The good, the bad, the business case for doing better.
jemck at Waterstones & Gender Equality. The good, the bad & the business case for doing better.
Originally published at Juliet E. McKenna. You can comment there.
First, some context. Over the past year or more, I’ve repeatedly highlighted instances of all or majority male bookshop displays for SF&Fantasy. Back in May, I flagged up the monthly promotional email from Waterstones which featured the Everyday Sexism book. It was the first readily identifiable book by a woman in that email, half way down the page, and one of only five titles by women compared to eight featured men. That post prompted a lively exchange on Twitter and in comments on the blog with Jon Howell, PR chap for Waterstones. Check back here if you missed that or wish to refresh your memory.
In discussions elsewhere on this issue with concerned writers and readers, we soon realised that we need more data. Especially if Waterstones don’t keep records of how many women they promote compared to men, as was stated at the time. So I went away and searched my Gmail archive and managed to retrieve 23 of those monthly emails, from March 2012 to June 2014, while pals around the country went to do a promotional table count in their local branches of Waterstones. I got 20 surveys in all. Given Waterstones has 275 branches, that’s less than 10% so this cannot be considered definitive data. However I consider it strongly indicative and certainly a sound basis for discussion.
Because as Managing Director James Daunt has been saying, offering discoverability to readers will be the key to Waterstones’ survival. What all this flags up to me is key areas where that discoverability is seriously lacking and where Waterstones could improve, to offer customers something they will not get from Amazon whose ‘if you like, try..’ algorithm pretty much only offers clones, or from WHSmiths or the supermarkets who only offer a narrow choice of already high-selling titles.
One last note. I don’t propose to identify the branches, since the object of this exercise is absolutely not to name and shame, especially since quite a few booksellers expressed their own exasperation at the narrow and narrowing range of books they’ve been told to promote. I also won’t identify those who sent me data, since quite a few are either involved in the book trade or related to writers (except to say thanks, Mum!) and I don’t want to cause inadvertent hassles for anyone. I am, needless to say, hugely grateful to everyone who took the time and trouble to send me their findings.
So what do the numbers tell us? Firstly, those monthly Book Shelf emails, sent to loyalty card holders. As Jon Howell indicated back in May, Book of the Month choices are equally shared between male and female authors – with the proviso that women are over represented in children’s and romance choices, where men dominate other areas. In the emails I received personally, every single non-fiction History choice was by a man. That’s no reflection on some excellent books but an early warning that statistics don’t tell you everything.
Jon Howell pointed out that I would be seeing more titles by women if I’d ticked the Romance, and Children’s selections for the system to tailor my emails, whereas I have opted for SFF and Popular Fiction, along with History in non-fiction preferences. Well, all that offers me is further proof of the increasingly narrow assumptions about what women authors are being expected/encouraged to write.
The monthly email format is fairly consistent. Some sections come and go and I’ll indicate those. The sections that always appear are the New Books and the Books You Love. 75% of New Book titles appearing at the top of these emails are written by men. Of the Backlist promotions beginning in January 2013, 70% are for male authors. Once again, this section is at the top of the page, as are the promotional banner adverts beginning in January 2013 which offer 60% books by men.
However looking at the Books You Love section which is right at the bottom of the email, thus far less prominent, I find 48% by men, 46% by women and 6% gender neutral by virtue of initials or an unusual name. Click through on any of those titles to the main Waterstones site and you’ll find yourself on the Bestsellers page. This strongly suggests to me that Books You Love is driven by actual sales. So people are going to buy books in roughly equal numbers by male and female authors alike. So why aren’t they offered headline choices that reflect that rather than such a strongly skewed selection?
Similar skew is apparent in the ‘Coming Soon’ selection, appearing below New Books from September 2013 – 65% male – and before than in the Books in the Media – 76% male – and Reviewed in the Newspapers – 70% male – selections, running up to July 2013. This incidentally offers further proof of the established gender bias in the wider media, thus making the ‘but we’re promoting the books people are interested in, just look at the papers’ defence meaningless.
However looking at the Staff Picks and What We’re Reading selections, where I’m assuming staff have some input, those choices are 53% male, 47% female. Once again, this would indicate a lack of gender bias among actual book lovers, as bookstore staff invariably are.
So setting aside issues of natural justice between the genders, the significant thing here from a business point of view is surely the disconnect between what people actually choose to read and what they’re being offered. So where is the possible downside in offering readers a more balanced choice – and with women writers being more visible at the top of these emails rather than being relegated to the bottom?
Now to the promotional tables in the shops. Given the variation in size and layout of different branches, this data can only offer a broad brush survey but as I say, I still think these findings are strongly indicative of areas for improvement.
On the general Buy One Get One Half Price tables, in all but one instance the gender balance ranged from 45% male/55% female to 65% male/35% female and was evenly spread across that range, so for all intents and purposes, we can consider that a 50/50 split. This is very good news. More than that, my impression as a reader and customer is there’s a fair degree of rotation in titles in these choices, offering new books a chance in the sun alongside the guaranteed bestsellers.
The 50/50 split was even clearer in the Summer Reading promotional tables, in stores offering those. Though individual tables might be seriously skewed in larger branches, with one offering chick-lit and romance by exclusively female authors alongside another offering thrillers all by men. But that’s at least as much a reflection of what’s written and published as it is of marketing choices.
However different pictures emerge when we look at books by genre. Any preconception that Childrens and Young Adult reading is dominated by women doesn’t hold up. The gender spread is pretty equal over all though there were more individual instances of markedly skewed displays. One bookshop had a table with 85% male authors while another had one with 60% women writers.
Crime showed an even greater range of variation. There were as many tables with more than 50% female authors as there were with more than 50% men overall but these varied from 100% male (Euro Crime) to one with below 40% male authors.
No such luck in SF&Fantasy. There were no tables with less than 55% male authors with the single exception of one SF&F Buy One Get One Half Price table in a large, city centre branch with an established reputation for its excellent genre range. Of the 21 SF&F promotional tables counted, 17 were 75% male authors or more. 5 were 95-100% male, including one all-male Future Noir offering. Where stores are large enough to separate out SF from Fantasy, the bias against women in SF was even more marked than that in fantasy.
In most shops, Horror is folded into SF&F but in three instances where Horror got its own table (not included in that total of 21), those were all 95% male authors.
There were three instances, not included in the count of 21, of all-female SF&F tables in large, city centre branches. This is a mixed blessing. While it’s welcome visibility, it also makes women writers much easier to ignore and risks perpetuating the notion that female authors are somehow different and not integrated into the mainstream of the genre.
Overall, once again, there’s more to this than simply the numbers. As one respondent said, ‘I don’t actually bother looking at the SF&F table these days. It’ll just be this year’s books by men I don’t read anyway.’ Looking back at my own photos of displays over the past few years bears this out. The same names recur time and again – as is the case in crime fiction, though not quite to the same extent. This does as much disservice to those other male authors who rarely, if ever, benefit from this level of promotion as it does to the women writers who are so routinely ignored.
More than that, these invariably include the (few) SF&F guaranteed-bestseller titles that the supermarkets will routinely offer, and at higher discount than bookstores can afford. So the bookshop is competing for that trade at a disadvantage from the outset. Whereas the pattern used to be a best-seller would emerge from the bookshops as they offered a wide selection of midlist and WHSmith and the supermarkets would scramble to catch up.
Whereas the evidence elsewhere is that SF&F writers have no problem reading and rewarding books written by women. Just look at the recent tally of genre awards and prizes. Once again, there’s a serious disconnect between what the readership wants and what is offered in Waterstones.
Why does this matter, when serious fans can get what they want from Amazon anyway? For two reasons. If you’ve been following the current negotiations between Amazon and various publishers, you should be seriously concerned at the implications of ending up with a single retailer intent on securing a monopoly and more than that, by their increasing desire to dictate terms to both suppliers and customers, up to and including attempting to force Hachette to renegotiate contractual terms with their authors (even if only as a PR stunt). (Links to sound analysis on this in this previous post)
No, Amazon isn’t Evil and they’re not The Enemy. It’s a commercial company and this is capitalism. But capitalism only works in everyone’s interests if there is competition. We need bookshops to keep the system working. Does anyone with a scintilla of business sense believe Amazon will continue to offer free shipping, if there’s no one else for customers to do business with? Do we believe that they will continue to offer 70% royalties to authors, if there’s nowhere else for them to publish their books? Yes, that’s a worst-case scenario but irreparable damage will done well before we reach that point.
Secondly, in the current harsh economic climate, those high-volume, highly engaged SF&F fans are highly unlikely to prove a sufficiently large market to sustain the current and increasingly interesting and wide-ranging SF&F being written. We’re seeing new voices and new interpretations right across speculative fiction. This is excellent. This may also be a very short-lived flowering, if authors incomes continue to fall – something I can attest to from personal experience as I’ve seen my advances shrink, translation income vanish and backlist sales fall off a cliff in the last ten years. Some writers will be willing and more pertinently, able to continue working more for love than money. More won’t.
A sustained writing career relies on reaching beyond the core fans to the five-to-ten books-a-year reader. Offer those readers something new and bookshop may well increase purchases by such customers, to the benefit of their bottom line. Only ever offer them the same as before and that’s all the store will sell – assuming those readers haven’t already picked up those books along with their groceries at Sainsbury’s or Asda.
Yes, gender equality is a feminist issue. When it comes to bookselling it is also a commercial issue. If Waterstones wants to offer customers the discoverability which they’re not going find elsewhere, surely extending the range and rotation of books promoted in their genre sections, by male and female authors alike, to equal the choices they already offer in general fiction, is simply good business?
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July 15, 2014
Submitted without Context...
July 14, 2014
More Magical Words from L.A. Kornetsky....
It's a Monday in July, so I (or rather, my alter-ego L. A. Kornetsky is) guest-blogging over at Magical Words....
"Talking to Myself for Fun and Profit." Yep - we're discussing writing characters, and uses of the Main Storytelling Brain.
July 13, 2014
Weekend indulgence...
This was a weekend, if not without deadlines, without stressful deadlines.
Saturday was all about the farmer's market and indulgent afternoons, and some continuing work on a client manuscript. But that indulgent afternoon also led to the discovery that my spice cabinet had a mild infestation of bugs (as too often happens when you have a lot of organic flours, grains, and herbs). So Sunday morning was spent trashing half of them and putting the others in the freezer to see if they can be salvaged, wiping down all the cabinets in the kitchen, and cleaning out the pantry too, while I was at it, to make sure I got all of the bastards.
It's more annoying than anything, and as someone said, at least now I can go buy new spices, which I always enjoy, but.... gr. Not how I'd planned to spend the morning. Still, if that's the worst that happens...
On the plus side, the felines were highly active and playful all day - they may have been getting stoned off cleaning supplies - and there was much chasing-of-tails and pouncing-on-noses.
And then I went off to have dinner at Atlantic Grill with my sister for her birthday. No, her card does not say "you're older than dirt." I did that one last year.
(she's 52. That's a +10 saving roll on being The Answer)
There was a watermelon gazpacho for a starter, and grilled Bronzino that was to die for, and a mixed-berry cobbler with strawberry gelato that was also to die for, and then I - indirectly and unintentionally - introduced my sister to the honey badger meme. Ooops. (she's now singing "badger badger badger" to the cats. Oh dear.)
And now, full of good food and good conversation, and Plans for tomorrow, I am going to pass out....
Everyone ready for Monday?
July 10, 2014
a rare throwback thursday...
World Fantasy, 1998. Not the shortest my hair has ever been, but damned close...
July 9, 2014
Are you in the Doghouse yet?
Author copies! (Plus a curious Kitten)
When Ginny Mallard and her sometimes-partner Teddy Tonica are asked to look into the situation of an old man about to be evicted, the part-time investigators think it’s just a matter of sorting out misunderstandings. But this is no simple landlord-tenant spat, bringing them headfirst – and nose-deep in trouble – into the world of back-room fights and animal rights…
And this time, Ginny’s shar-pei, Georgie, and the bar cat Penny are the only ones who can get the truth out of their sole witness: a puppy named Parsifal!
DOGHOUSE will be in stores July 22nd. But I am running out of shelf space, so I need to find good homes for some of these. Want one? Two randomly-chosen commenters will win!
July 7, 2014
Monday
Meanwhile, for you, I'm doing a guest stint this month at Magical Words....
